Apathy for the Devil (41 page)

In point of fact, the city had little to boast about - popwise - until the advent of punk in 1976, when the Buzzcocks took it upon themselves to single-handedly raise local standards of group-forming and electrified music-making. As soon as the Pete Shelley-led combo burst nervously upon the national scene, the floodgates were flung open throughout the region as a tidal wave of young Mancunian dreamers determined to chance their arms on a stage or in a demo studio poured out into the public spectrum. This was UK punk’s most far-reaching gift to popular culture - the long-overdue de-Americanisation of rock as a medium of expression, thus making it a vehicle for all comers. Suddenly it was cool to be English. John Lydon and Ian Dury weren’t the first blokes to sneerfully sing in unadorned English prole tonalities - both Syd Barrett and David Bowie had been doing it ten years earlier - but they were easily the most influential, setting off a national wake-up call throughout the British Isles. Literally overnight, any UK group still singing in dodgy mid-Atlantic accents about rocking down the highway all the way to Memphis was rendered obsolete. Suddenly it was the ‘in’ thing to create lyrical scenarios set strictly in one’s own neck of the woods and to be voiced in similarly Anglocentric tones, and no area benefited more from this state of affairs than Manchester. London’s youth have always been by nature somewhat narcissistic and straitjacketed into a suffocating sense of their own perceived cool, but the lads and lasses up North were a lot less self-conscious and unafraid to go out on a limb even if it meant making complete fools of themselves in the process. They generally made a refreshing change from the po-faced Southern art-school wannabes who were busy scurrying aboard the new-wave bandwagon like rats off a sinking ship.

My favourite late-seventies Manc creative upstart was a pencil-thin poet named John Cooper Clarke. He was more of a beat poet than a punk per se, being older even than me, but the movement had emboldened him to stand onstage in various local pubs without the aid of musical accompaniment and fire up the punters’ imaginations with his often hilarious scattershot stanzas of self-penned verse. Seeing him in action was always a sight to behold. He looked like a cross between
Blonde on Blonde
-era Bob Dylan and a willow tree in a windstorm. His skinny legs shook so much when he performed you could practically hear his knees knocking together in time with his own spoken-word routines.

In October of 1978 the
NME
sent me up to Manchester to generally sound him out. I liked him immediately - it was almost impossible to do otherwise. The guy was one of the funniest raconteurs and natural storytellers to stumble out of late-twentieth-century Britain. His life up to that date had been one long calamity stream and his recollections were all tragicomical, with the emphasis always on the uproariously comedic. For example, he had a seemingly limitless supply of woebegotten tales involving him trying to score reefer from the Jamaican community in Prestwich and being generally short-changed that - when woven together - made for an absolutely brilliant oral novel. Thirty years later, I’m still waiting for his autobiography to be published. When it finally arrives, I know it’ll be a masterpiece.

I saw a lot of Johnny Clarke in 1979 because he’d often be in London and we’d stayed in touch. On a couple of occasions, I spent the evening with him and the guy who was producing his records at the time, the now-legendary Martin Hannett. I’ve since seen Hannett portrayed in films as an out-of-control nutcase but he always seemed pretty rational to me - passionate about music,
liked to smoke pot, but no signs of inner turbulence to indicate that I was in the presence of the future ‘mad, bad, dangerous to know’ Phil Spector of the North. I think when he started reaping success with his production work he just opted to assume a scary image in order to mask his insecurities, and that image ended up overpowering and ultimately consuming him. The drugs obviously played their part as well. He and Clarke were still really just diehard reefer heads when I was rubbing shadows with them. But they were both ripe for further chemical experimentation - like two blokes who’d grown up listening spellbound to their Velvet Underground records and who now had the chance to live out what those songs had been talking about.

I’m trying to ransack my memory to come up with some salient scrap of detail Hannett might have told me about his working relationship with Joy Division-a relationship that would have begun not long before we met - but nothing is forthcoming. He must have at least mentioned the group to me, but nothing really registered. In retrospect it’s good that Morley was on board the
NME
because he recognised something special in Ian Curtis’s fledgling quartet, something that none of the older scribes was able to decipher.

I’ll readily admit it-I was much too jaded to see any value in what Joy Division had to offer the end-of-the-decade pop/rock landscape. I’d been lucky enough to see both the Doors and the Stooges live in their prime and had little interest in watching a former young civil servant and his three mates trying valiantly to channel a similar sense of all-encompassing musical dread. It was only with the release of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ that I started taking them seriously. Then I saw some TV footage of the group in concert and it all clicked. Curtis had absolutely none of the
wayward sexual magnetism of an Iggy or Jim Morrison but more than made up for its absence by exuding a singular charisma born of suffocating discomfort and the looming threat of imminent epileptic collapse. I can see now that the guy was a significant talent, but by the same token whenever I’m confronted by his image I automatically think of that line Jack Nicholson delivered in
Prizzi’s Honor
- ‘If this guy was so fucking great, then how come he’s so fucking dead?’

When it comes to Manc indie icons, I’ve always preferred Mark E. Smith of the Fall anyway. Not so much for his group’s early musical output - which in 1979 was practically corrosive to the human ear - but because of his take-no-prisoners mega-truculent personality. I’ve never, ever written about the Fall but I got to know Smith quite well in the mid-eighties because we happened to frequent the same London-based speed dealer’s ramshackle apartment down around King’s Cross. He was just a skinny Northern lad back then who looked like his mother still dressed him but he had such a forceful personality you’d have thought he was Giant Haystacks the professional wrestler. He really is the closest thing England has ever spat out to compare with American hard-boiled rock ’n’ roll cranks like Jerry Lee Lewis, and I’ve spent quality time with both men.

In 1994 the Rolling Stones invited Lewis to a recording session and the old bastard apparently never stopped criticising them to their faces, calling them amateurs and all-purpose soft lads until steam was coming out of Keith Richards’s ears. In 1987 I once found myself in a room with the Fall leader as well as Nick Cave and Shane MacGowan and witnessed Smith do much the same thing to his two peers, mercilessly nit-picking at their music and respective images and even making untoward remarks about their
countries of origin. They just sat there and took it, much like the Stones had done with the Killer.

He was generally quite civil to me though, maybe because I was well known as one of Iggy Pop’s early champions and Mancs generally look up to Iggy like born-again Christians tend to revere Jesus Christ. The only points of conflict we ran into revolved around my unstinting admiration of the Smiths. Let’s just say that Mark Smith wasn’t a big fan of the group’s lead singer and never let an opportunity pass to verbalise his contempt. The last time I saw him was in a pub practically adjacent to King’s Cross station at the close of 1987. He’d just finished touring America with the Fall and had talked witheringly about the new ‘health consciousness’ craze supposedly sweeping the country. ‘Fat blokes in sweatbands jogging down highways, women with huge biceps and skin like old leather handbags.’ He then paused and looked around at the pallid forms and grey faces collected together in the main bar with real joy in his eyes. ‘I can’t tell you how good it feels to be standing next to really unhealthy-looking people again.’ He was another one who followed Lester Bangs’s dictum - the more you slowly poison yourself the more illuminated your creative output becomes. ‘I read the other day that your pal Morrissey has started working out at a gymnasium each day before he goes in the studio to record,’ he remarked to me at one point with a suitably sardonic grin on his face. ‘Aye - all creative inspiration sweated out of the man before he can even get close to a microphone.’

Looking back at the end of the seventies, there’s surprisingly little that’s managed to last the test of time for me. For every Fall and Joy Division, there were a thousand careerist drones like Simple Minds and the Boomtown Rats infiltrating
Top of the Pops
and generally hogging the spotlight. Dire Straits - pub rock for the rising young homeowner demographic - were suddenly hugely popular on both sides of the Atlantic. The two least impressive acts to have come out of the mid-seventies Manhattan proto-punk clubland explosion - Blondie and Talking Heads - both managed to build lucrative, chart-busting, internationally successful careers for themselves during this period whilst the trailblazing likes of Television, Patti Smith and Richard Hell all fell by the wayside. And then came the rise of synth pop: blokes with dodgy haircuts hunched over keyboard-operated machines stuffed with wires and do-it-yourself tone oscillators making sounds like a brood of geese passing gas in a wind tunnel. Whoopee! This was the way the seventies ended: not with a blood-curdling bang but with a cheap, synthesised, emasculated whimper.

Not even the old sixties guard could forestall the sharp dip in musical standards that prevailed at decade’s end. With Mick Jagger once more at the helm, the Rolling Stones managed to record and release their last real album of consequence -
Some Girls
- in 1978 but the record’s subsequent success only set into motion yet another long creative slump. By 1979 Jagger and Richards had fallen into open conflict over key issues regarding the group’s general direction, and Ronnie Wood was busy introducing himself to a new and extremely costly form of drug dependency then emerging from the West Coast of America: freebase cocaine. Keith Moon’s death in September ’78 robbed the Who of their unpredictable engine. The other three continued for a while with a new drummer but all the zany energy and sense of spontaneous combustion that had typified the group in live performance suddenly vanished from their repertoire.

Led Zeppelin eventually regrouped after the death of Robert Plant’s son but Plant was increasingly disturbed to find two members of his old quartet and their manager still addicted to hard drugs. A final album was laid down mostly in Abba’s Stockholm studio at the end of ’78, but the singer and the bass player liked to work mostly during daylight hours whilst the guitarist and drummer tended to only come alive after dark. This conflict in personal schedules ended up destabilising the group’s precious human chemistry. The resulting album
In Through the Out Door
lacked the authority, drive and inner cohesion that Jimmy Page had brought to previous sessions as player, co-composer and producer.

Led Zeppelin then performed two colossal shows at Knebworth in August ’79 - their last hurrah on British shores - followed by a short European tour in the summer of the following year. An American tour - their first since the Oakland debacle - had been negotiated to commence during October of 1980 but then on September 24th John Bonham - apparently ill at ease about his upcoming duties in a country that always seemed to bring the worst out in him - calmed his nerves during a group rehearsal at Jimmy Page’s house by downing some forty measures of vodka mixed together with a ‘mood-altering’ medication he’d been prescribed known as Motival and then falling asleep. He somehow choked to death in his slumber and never woke up again.

The repercussions were enormous. The biggest band of the seventies had lost an irreplaceable component and suddenly had no other option but to splinter apart. Another major creative player over the past ten years, Neil Young, was also stricken by grievous tidings during this period: he and second wife Pegi gave birth to
a son named Ben on November 28th 1978 who was duly diagnosed as suffering from acute cerebral palsy. Young committed most of his energies in the following years to tending to the welfare of his immediate family and guarding them from any kind of public scrutiny. In the process, he closed himself down emotionally to the point where ‘I was making it, doing great with surviving - but my soul was completely encased. I didn’t even consider that I would need a soul to play my music, that when I shut the door on pain, I shut the door on my music.’

And then there was the matter of Bob Dylan’s sudden religious conversion. 1978 was the year the Bard of Beat chose to release
Renaldo and Clara
, the cinematic disaster zone he’d filmed on the fly and then painstakingly pieced together over the previous three years. It lasted more than four hours and generally left viewers with the sensation that they’d been watching paint dry. Everyone was hoping the most mysterious presence in popular music would finally strip aside his many masks as the camera rolled but all he ended up revealing was a taste for plot-free, scattershot surrealism and auteurish self-indulgence that had mercifully fallen out of vogue in the film world by the end of the sixties.

‘Dylan’s folly’ as it quickly came to be known was hauled over the critical coals hither and yon upon its release and the catcalls kept coming throughout the rest of ’78, mainly in America. Dylan released a new album that year -
Street-Legal
- and embarked on a lengthy world tour, his first since 1966. The Japanese and European dates were well-received but the 110 US dates that followed were often savaged by the nation’s media pundits. Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young had lately been ordained rock’s new reigning messiahs and all of a sudden the taste-makers were openly insinuating that the man who’d first
inspired Springsteen and Young to actually write songs was no longer worthy of being talked about in their lofty pantheon.